How to make friends and influence people, MS style.
- Reveal new console, yet alienate core gaming audience of your new device, by promoting cable TV and apps over videogames.
- Introduce policies that would be massively damaging to consumer rights, prevent people without quality broadband from using your console, and blocking Indies from self publishing content.
- Promote policies and direction with aggressive, patronising PR.
- Mandatory Kinect forces console performance to be significantly less than main competitor, while being significantly more expensive to buy.
- Defend this decision by stating that performance doesn't matter.
- Reverse hated policies, while pushing the PR message that this was your plan all along.
- Do a PR push to claim that the performance of your console is just as good as your competitor. Back this up with sums pulled out of your ass.
Performance differences aside, what has come from MS ever since the Xbone reveal has been nothing short of catastrophes. Every time there seems to be a glimmer of hope they're making amends, something else comes along that raises the hackles of gamers.
The parallels to pre-PS3 Sony are incredible. The levels of hubris are the same. The horrid PR is the same. But MS trumped Sony with their original DRM/online bullshit which is far harder to forgive than any of the shit that Sony pulled in 2006/7.
What if I'm scared of dogs?